Digbeth is Good
Culture, pubs and a whole lot more.

The way you’re describing the place, echoing Hay-on-Wye and a sort of local distinctiveness, lends itself to thinking about semi-formal events management, a kind of neighbourhood association. No doubt something like that already exists, so what might underscore your ideas is the visual expression of connectedness.

Brand types would be talking about signage – things like the Jewellery Qtr heritage trail markers, for people to use in ‘wandering’ their way to the next place. But it can be more guerilla-like, informal stuff that just lends to the atmosphere. The paper/graffiti images that have been going up lately are an example.

But the correlation between individual and aggregate can be made in other ways, through smaller, ongoing activities like a series of talks, readings, lunches, walks. It’s these more fine-grained things that cement the reputation of a given area.

Cheers. Like the idea of signage directing you to other spaces.

Actually thinking I should check out the galleries’ schedules and possibly arrange some sort of informal meet-up and walk-round of them when there’s a few concurrent exhibitions running. Hell, I’ll be checking them out anyway, might as well arrange some nice company! :-)

[...] Digbeth’s art space cluster – Nicky Getgood looks at the galleries and creative spaces in the area and proposes Digbeth becomes synonymous with art in the same way Hay of Wye is synonymous with books. [...]

I hate the phrase “art space cluster”. It’s a curse that funding bodies seem to generate bureaucaratic boliocks such as this with no sense of irony or even understanding on their part.

I’ve worked in branding/marketing/advertising for donkey’s years. And – in my view – marketing is all about communicating what is different about a product or service to people who appreciate the difference through media that they respect and messages that they appreciate and understand. Pretty simple, really.

So in terms of a marketable product, what is Digbeth? An area of living industrial heritage. A place where a ‘let’s try it’ attitude to all things artistic exists beyond the straitjacket of funding. A place where you can encounter the unimagined; where there is always a sense of living on the front lines of the battle between decay and creation. An anarchic and unpredictable maelstrom of ideas and enterprise. It’s exciting because it is untamed.

By contrast, Hay-on-Wye (mentioned above) – lovely as it is – has become a pastiche of itself. This is what happens when culture is packaged for easy consumption by the chattering classes (damn their blinkered orthodoxy). If you don’t show your copy of the Guardian at the border and listen to Radio 4 constantly on your iPod (latest iteration, obviously), you’ll be humanely stunned and turned into compost.

Let’s keep Digbeth real – forged by industry, reshaped by artistic endeacvour and sustained by a healthy cynicism for the big plans of the dwarfish minds of what passes for political leadership in this city these days.

Meybe we don’t need signs and markers to direct daytrippers, thrill-seekers and tourists to Birmingham’s only truly bohemian quarter. Perhaps we should direct our efforts online. Digbeth is a place to be discovered and shared by people who are willing to explore themselves as much as the location itself.

My submission to the Big City Plan? It doesn’t matter. The City Council have already shown their contempt for the citizens of Birmingham by running the consultation exercise AFTER they drew up their plan. For example, this question on the Big City Plan website asks:

“How can we transform the traditional industrial quarters – eg. Digbeth, the Gun Quarter – into greener, more attractve spaces?”

Which suggests that a) what we’ve got is not alreday attractive as a post-industrial cityscape and b) needs to be replaced by “greeener, more attractive spaces”. That would be Eastside Park, then? No bias in that question, is there?

Personally, I have no interest whatsoever in being part of an “art space cluster” or in helping Birmingham City Council to justifgy its attempts to make the city as nondescript and off-the-shelf urban boring as possible through a pointless “consultation” scam. Give me the chaos and the beauty of Digbeth as it is – unplanned, untamed and unique.

Until there are people with real vision on the City Council they should stick to the basics: collecting bins, repairing the roads and keeping the schools open.

Sorry, that last post turned into a bit of a rant about the Big City Plan rather than your ideas for linking together different artistic endeavours around Digbeth. I think that’s a good idea as long as it doesn’t turn Digbeth into Hay-on-Wye World – lovely to look at and visit, but all a bit self-congratulatory.

[...] Digbeth’s art space cluster – Nicky Getgood looks at the galleries and creative spaces in the area and proposes Digbeth becomes synonymous with art in the same way Hay of Wye is synonymous with books. [...]

Afraid the title Art Space Cluster came out of my head because I didn’t have a clue WHAT on earth to call it. Point taken though, it is a bit management-speak, sorry. I think I wrote this in the middle of translating the Big City Plan, which is my only defence! ;-)

I also take your point about Hay-on-Wye these days being a bit OTT (still love a visit, mind). I just felt that there is this hive of activity going on here and it would be nice to draw attention to the whole as well as the parts. And not by shoving some brand over it or changing what’s happening for image’s sake, just by possibly shifting the focus on what’s already here.

In the beginning, Hay-on-Wye was ‘untamed and unique’ under the leadership of the seriously eccentric Richard Booth. I think that’s why it succeeded and ones that have tried to merely copy the formula without having the soul, like Blaenavon, haven’t fared so well. Like you say, Digbeth has a very real soul, there’d be no faking it. I suppose I’d just like it shouted about more and for more people to know how great it is by somehow painting the complete picture, not just the smaller details.

[...] is Good muses on the developing small cluster of contemporary art spaces in [...]

[...] is Good muses on the developing small cluster (we need a word for one of those: a cleat?) of contemporary art spaces [...]